Stony Browder Jr.

Stony Browder Jr. was a mutant-disco band built on rebellion, joy and raw human energy. It was named in honour of our late uncle, Stony Browder Jr., founder of the Grammy-nominated Dr. Buzzard's Original Savannah Band, and carried forward the same spirit of musical independence and cultural defiance.

No laptops. No playback. No safety net. Just people, instruments and songs about revolution.

Releases: The Whole Circus EP (2015), Live in a Volatile Environment EP (2016), Technicolour Civilisation EP (2017) and Live at The Bedford 2013 (2019).

The story

After success with a project rooted in electronic performance, we deliberately went the other way. Stony Browder Jr. had a strict “no microchip” rule: everything had to be live, human and real.

At its core it was a collective of 14 musicians and performers, stuffed into a half-broken splitter van, building a reputation purely by word of mouth. No website, no social media, no releases, just a message of revolution. Over three years my younger brother Dario Darnell and I wrote more than 60 songs for the band, somewhere between funk, soul, disco and protest: bright, jubilant and confrontational, cutting through a politically darker moment in the UK.

The result

From 2013 to 2016 the band existed entirely off-grid, growing an audience through live shows alone. Only after years of gigs did we release the first of two EPs, capturing a fraction of what had become a fully realised live experience. Chaotic, joyful, unfiltered: proof that you don't need technology to make something feel huge.